A health and fitness blog based out of Fredonia, NY

Tag Archives: planet

As an assignment, we had to ask a classmate to do a guest blog post on our own blogs. My friend Anne, who has an awesome blog about conservation and sustainability, was nice enough to write a post for me! Check it out below, let us know what you think, and take a look at her blog, here!

SustainableFred.wordpress.com

As a college student, I am no stranger to eating on the go. Over the past few decades, we have changed as a culture. Some of us don’t even leave our cars for dinner and many meals are consumed outside of the home.

In a previous post, I mentioned Mark Hyman, MD as he wrote a blog for the Huffington Post on food sustainability. Hyman warns in his post that not only are our convenience food practices not good for the earth, but for our health as well. He says, “One hundred years ago all we ate was local, organic food — grass-fed, real, whole food. There were no fast food restaurants, there was no junk food, there was no frozen food — there was just what your mother or grandmother made. Most meals were eaten at home. Now, one in five breakfasts is from McDonald’s and 50 percent of meals are eaten outside the home.”

We must remember that it is not too late to change. Our packaged, factory farmed food is a fairly new practice, and above all we must remember that we made our world this way. So we must take it upon ourselves to change again. We are not separate from our environment, we are undoubtedly linked to our surroundings. Food sustainability is not only important for our planet, but for our bodies as well.

Hyman explains, “Broccoli, peaches, almonds, kidney beans, and other whole foods don’t need a food ingredient label or bar code, but for some reason these foods — the foods we co-evolved with over millennia — had to be “improved” by Food Science. As a result, the processed food industry and industrial agriculture have changed our diet, decade by decade, not by accident but by intention.”

He also argues that while most Americans say that they do not have time or do not know how to cook, most will spend more time watching cooking shows than actually cooking.

As a fast past society, we must take a step back. We need to eat in more, carve out time for preparing our own meals. Skip the high calorie, nutritionally low to-go food. The best way we can respect the earth, is to respect what it produces. As Hyman says, “The earth will survive our self-destruction, but we may not.”

Yeah, I’m a vegetarian. No, I’m not going to shove my ideas down your throat. But I will tell you how becoming a vegetarian not only helps save the planet, but also 100 animals a year, per person.

Almost 8 years ago, I was a freshman in high school. My English class was doing thesis papers, and my best friend was doing hers on vegetarianism. While I thought it was interesting, it wasn’t until I actually read facts about it that I became genuinely interested. A lover of planet earth and mother nature, I knew that this was something I could do to help out in a small, but impactful way.

What most people don’t realize is that the animals they are eating were not found in nature, they were raised. Somewhere, a massive farm was built on land to raise and house these animals. Fresh water is used in their feeding process. More land is used to harvest hay and other crops to feed these animals. Massive amounts of waste is created by these animals, often placed in areas that can contaminate our own food and drinking water.

I know many people don’t agree with PETA sometimes, but this is a statement by them on the impact of these animals:

“Plainly put, the sheer quantity of animals required to feed people’s taste for meat, dairy products, and eggs makes humane, environmentally responsible practices impossible. Profitability dictates that the meat, dairy, and egg industries crowd the largest number of animals into the smallest space possible, leading to massive water pollution, soil erosion from the amount of crops needed to feed these animals, and other eco-nightmares.”

Though slightly biased, this information is all based on actual fact, which is hard to dispute. Think about these other alarming facts and statistics:

Researchers at the University of Chicago concluded that switching from a standard American diet to a vegan diet is more effective in the fight against climate change than switching from a standard American car to a hybrid.

A German study conducted in 2008 concluded that a meat-eater’s diet is responsible for more than seven times as much greenhouse-gas emissions as a vegan’s diet is.

Producing a little more than 2 pounds of beef causes more greenhouse-gas emissions than driving a car for three hours and uses up more energy than leaving your house lights on for the same period of time.

According to scientists at the Smithsonian Institution, seven football fields’ worth of land is bulldozed every minute to create more room for farmed animals and the crops that feed them.

Of all the agricultural land in the U.S., 80 percent is used to raise animals for food and grow grain to feed them—that’s almost half the total land mass of the lower 48 states.

A study in Texas found that animal feedlots in that state produce more than 7,000 tons of particulate dust every year and that the dust “contains biologically active organisms such as bacteria, mold, and fungi from the feces and the feed.”

Farmed animals produce more than 10 times as much excrement as does the entire human population of the United States.

If you’ve been thinking about making the switch to vegetarianism or veganism, let this be even more motivation. Help save your planet in a huge way!